ingly: "Have you forgotten our conversation only three days ago? Have you forgotten that I then drew forth the secret of your heart? Have you forgotten what I promised you in return for your confidence? and a promise to you have I ever yet broken?"

"Father! father! I am so wretched, and so ashamed of myself for being wretched! Forgive me. No, I do not forget your promise; but who can promise to dispose of the heart of another? and that heart will never be mine. But bear with me a little, I shall soon recover."

"Valérie, when I made you the promise you now think I cannot keep, I spoke only from that conviction of power to promote the happiness of a child which nature implants in the heart of parents; and it may be also from the experience of my own strength of will, since that which I have willed I have always won. Now I speak on yet surer ground. Before the year is out you shall be the beloved wife of Alain de Rochebriant. Dry your tears and smile on me, Valérie. If you will not see in me mother and father both, I have double love for you, motherless child of her who shared the poverty of my youth, and did not live to enjoy the wealth which I hold as a trust for that heir to mine all which she left me."

As this man thus spoke you would scarcely have recognised in him the cold saturnine Duplessis, his countenance became so beautified by the one soft feeling which care and contest, ambition and money-seeking, had left unaltered in his heart. Perhaps there is no country in which the love of parent and child, especially of father and daughter, is so strong as it is in France; even in the most arid soil, among the avaricious, even among the profligate, it forces itself into flower. Other loves fade away: in the heart of the true Frenchman that parent love blooms to the last.

Valérie felt the presence of that love as a divine protecting guardianship. She sank on her knees and covered his hand with grateful kisses.

"Do not torture yourself, my child, with jealous fears of the fair Italian. Her lot and Alain de Rochebriant's can never unite; and whatever you may think of their whispered converse, Alain's heart, at this moment, is too filled with anxious troubles to leave one spot in it accessible even to a frivolous gallantry. It is for us to remove these troubles; and then, when he turns his eyes towards you, it will be with the gaze of one who beholds his happiness. You do not weep now, Valérie !"

ONE of the effects of the individual self-confidence which is so general an attribute of us Anglo-Saxons, is to incline us to face marriage without calculating its cost. We do it because it tempts and interests us at the moment, trusting to luck and to our strong arms for the means of keeping our wife and children. There is something manly and vigorous in this way of acting of course it is rash and dangerous, of course it often leads to all kinds of worry, and it sometimes ends in downright misery; but there is a pluckiness about it which commends itself to our natures. Political economists and philosophers go on attacking it with unavailing arguments and unconvincing proofs. Right as they may be in theory, they do not influence our practice; "improvident marriages" are as numerous as ever. We are not a prudent people in this respect, and neither earnest books nor eloquent discourses are likely to change our tendencies. Most of us believe, in varying degrees, in our own innate power of overcoming obstacles as they arise. We do not shrink from matrimony because it may involve us in risks and difficulties; we rush at it because it attracts us at the moment, and because we are surrounded by crowds of people who have done the same before us, and have struggled somehow through the consequences of their hurry or their error.

The process of the French, on this point as on so many others, is in absolute contradiction with our own. Where we decide and act, they weigh, and calculate, and hesitate, and consider. They reach no

resolve until they fancy they have exhausted the measurement of advantages and disadvantages, until they have pondered over probabilities and possibilities, until they imagine they have united as many elements of success as human foresight can collect. It can scarcely be said that even in England marriage is regarded as a purely personal arrangement, concerning only the two immediate parties to it. We admit, in our upper classes at least, that it involves considerations of a varied nature, which justify and sometimes even require the intervention of parents and families. But the French carry this intervention to a length which we could not support: they leave no liberty and no action to the coming couple: the whole thing is taken out of their hands they are treated as if they were incompetent in the question: their parents undertake the negotiation for them, and handle it as governments deal with international treaties. Glaringly evident as are the emotionality and the mobility of the French in other phases of their conduct, they have no application here. They find their use abundantly in superficial sentiments, in the forms and thoughts and words of outside existence, in the manifestation of already existing affections; but, with rare exceptions, they have nothing to do with the preparation of a marriage. Their place is taken, on that one occasion, by a dry, arithmetical computation of practical results, with no excitement and with no distractions. Where we so ordinarily listen to what we understand by love, to the temptations of

the young heart in all their forms (however transitory), to our individual impressions and to our own opinions, the French consult fitnesses of relative situation, reciprocities of fortune and position, and harmonies of family intercourse. They seek to insure the future, in some degree, in its social as well as its pecuniary forms. They lay it down that passion is no guide to permanent satisfaction, and that other people than the two directly interested have, both in law and reason, a right of judgment in so grave a case. This does not absolutely mean that preexisting sympathies are considered to be unnecessary for marriage in France; but it does mean, in the distinctest language, that such sympathies alone are not admitted there as a sufficient motive for an association which is to last till death. Sympathies wear out sometimes; new ones grow up from other contacts; eternal attachments are very rare between people who have not managed to get married, and have not the aid of the wedded tie to hold them steadily together: but the necessities of life never fade away; they never weaken; they remain in force with pitiless persistence, and French parents pay more attention to them than to what may be only a passing inclination in their sons and daughters.

And it must be borne in mind that this view of marriage is not solely a development of the national disposition towards prudence; it is also, to some extent at all events, a consequence of the legal enactments contained in the Code Napoléon. The law forbids all marriages without either the consent of the father and mother, or proof that they are both dead. It is very troublesome to get married in France; the operation is surrounded by difficulties and formalities which would make

an Englishman stamp with rage. It is true that if parents refuse to allow their children to follow their own wishes, the latter are permitted, provided they have attained their majority, to go through a process called " a respectful summons to consent," after which, if the parents persist in their rejection of the appeal, marriage may be at last attained. No matter at what age a man or a woman marry, even if they are sixty, they must either produce the written consent of their father and mother, or show that they have applied for it in due legal form and that it has been denied them without sufficient cause, or prove that they are orphans. The object of this legislation is not only to prevent bigamy (which, under such conditions, is naturally rare in France), but, even more, to maintain parental authority, and to insure a due subjection of children. So far there is something to be said in its favour, especially as, in many cases, it really does protect young people against their own folly. But as, after all, marriage is a complex state, requiring something more than a father's approbation to conduct it to success, it is natural that we, who regard the entire subject from a very different point of view, should have a good many objections to urge.

The question, however, is not merely one of legal forms and parental privileges; it contains a vast deal more besides. As marriage is the real starting-point of home life-as the happiness of husbands, wives, and children depends, in a great degree, on the conditions under which it is realised and worked out -it is fair, and even necessary, to judge it not only in its beginnings and its organisation, but in its results as well. Indeed it would be rather difficult in such a case to

consider causes without effects. We look, instinctively, from one to the other, and, half-unconsciously, estimate the value of the commencement by the value of the end. But how are the results of marriage to be correctly measured? We all know how difficult it is to make a definite opinion for ourselves on the point even in the case of the friends with whom we live in constant intimacy, whose interiors we know in detail, whose quarrels, whose special sympathies, whose qualities and defects, we have had some means of testing. How then, if it be so hard a task to reach a conviction in the few cases round us, can we hope to form a judgment fairly applicable to an entire nation? Vague ideas are of no use here; prejudices mislead; facts are impossible to collect on so large a scale. And yet there is a guide, an incomplete and insufficient one, but still a safe one so far as it can lead us; that guide is the impression which a nation entertains about itself. If we consult it carefully we get the accumulated experience of the mass in the only form in which it manifests itself on such a subject as this. There are no returns, no reports, no statistics to refer to; but there are drawing-room talks, and half-confidences, and village rumours, and the gossip of the market-place, and the wise head-suakings of the old people; and with their aid, if we listen closely, we can compose a tolerably approximate picture of what all these indications describe. But we can only do it fairly on condition of being scrupulously exact, of effacing from our memory all predisposition towards special shades and special forms, of marking down absolutely nothing of what our own imagination so easily suggests, and of strictly limiting our colouring to what we are quite certain that we

distinctly see. have to reconcile bitter contradictions, to group together the most opposite results, to institute a comparison of causes.

And, even then, we

But before we consider the evidence thus obtainable as to the moral results of marriage in France, it may be useful to cast a glance at the material comparison which it is possible to make between the quantity of marrying which takes place amongst the French, and the corresponding figures on the same subject which other nations offer. In his 'Eléments de Statistique,' M. Moreau de Jonnès gives a table of the number of marriages which are effected annually in the principal countries of Europe. Ireland comes first with one marriage for each ninety inhabitants; France is sixteenth with 1 for 122; England twenty-seventh with 1 in 137; Tuscany twenty-eighth and last, with 1 in 143. Now if this be true-and the well-known name of M. Moreau de Jonnès may be accepted as a guarantee for the exactness of the numbers-it seems to follow that, notwithstanding our headstrong imprudence, we English actually marry less, proportionately, than the prudent, calculating French, who look before they leap. This is an unexpected fact to start with, but, if it be a fact, it indicates, with tolerable distinctness, that the hesitations which precede all marriages in France do not really stop marriage, for the French stand in the middle of the table which has just been quoted, below the Northern races, which (excepting England) head the list, but above all the Southern States, which close it. The position thus indicated for France is the very one which would appear to be the most desirable to occupy; it is a fair average, showing neither too little nor too much.